May 9, 1999

By V. R. BERGHAHN

THE PITY OF WAR
By Niall Ferguson.
Illustrated. 563 pp. New York:
Basic Books. $30.

orld WAR I was not only the first of the major catastrophes disrupting this century, but perhaps the worst, especially in its long-term impact. Even in an era when we have learned to count the dead in millions, some casualty figures for the Great War are still difficult to grasp. In one attack at Ypres in Belgium the British lost a staggering 13,000 men in a mere three hours, while gaining no more than 100 yards for the sacrifice. On July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British suffered 60,000 casualties in an assault preceded by a six-day artillery bombardment of German lines. Although the Germans had been hit by three million shells along a 12-mile stretch, enough survived to offer fierce resistance. When this battle ended, total casualties amounted to over 1.1 million men. By 1918, the Allies counted 5.4 million dead and 7 million wounded; the two Central Powers suffered 4 million deaths and 8.3 million wounded.

Over the past two decades, excellent books have been published on how the troops experienced the ordeal, and valuable work has been done on the trauma the war inflicted on the home fronts. Drawing on this rich scholarship, Niall Ferguson, a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, has produced an illuminating synthesis of current knowledge on the war. ''The Pity of War'' may not be a total history, but the reader will find plenty of fresh information and challenging ideas on the conflict's most important aspects.

For example, in his chapter titled ''The Myth of War Enthusiasm,'' the author demonstrates how familiar images of men and women cheering leaders on mobilization day require qualification. There were countless nave volunteers; but there was also much anxiety and consternation. People cleared savings accounts, and in Hamburg a German trade unionist, witnessing the joy at a public rally, wondered in his diary: ''Am I mad or is it the others?'' Ferguson also investigates why men continued to fight long after it had dawned on them that this was not a conventional 19th-century war to be won in three months.

John Decker/ The New York Times

Niall Ferguson

"The Third Reich could never have come
about without the defeat of 1918 and all the subsequent upheavals. The idea that a victorious
Germany would have produced Hitler is completely implausible. It's the experience of defeat
and the economic trauma that follows on defeat which lays the foundations of Nazism. . . . If
the war had been won [Hitler] would have been a contented second-rate artist with nothing to
complain about." -- Niall Ferguson, from an interview with Bill Goldstein.

Later, he transforms himself into a rigorous economic historian to remind us of how the war destroyed the material well-being of millions. Here he is arguably at his most original, and most willing to challenge received views. He finds it remarkable that ''unprecedented though the costs of the war were in nominal terms, European taxpayers and, more importantly, international capital and money markets were well able to sustain some three years of slaughter'' before national economies began to collapse, and he wonders whether scholars exaggerate ''the economic importance of American money to the Allied war effort.'' He stresses the ''immense economic superiority'' of the Allies over the Central Powers, but takes the view that Germany was, in terms of financing the war, ''hardly as 'disastrous' or 'pathetic' as has often been claimed.'' Indeed, he marvels that ''Germany was able to sustain its war effort for as long as it did when its financial resources were so much more limited than those of its enemies.''

Ultimately, though, Ferguson is most provocative about the war's origins. He accepts that it was the top decision makers in Berlin and Vienna who pushed Europe over the brink in 1914, but he disagrees with historians who highlight the aggressive, expansionist aims of Germany. In his view, Berlin and Vienna unleashed the war because the generals were justifiably convinced that Britain, France and Russia had encircled them and that the strategic balance of forces would soon make German military defeat all but certain.

The German Government also felt beleaguered at home, where it proved increasingly impossible to raise money for rearmament against ever more powerful enemies. In this sense, Ferguson finds it legitimate to speak of ''the war's domestic origins'': ''The domestically determined financial constraint on Germany's military capability was a -- perhaps the -- crucial factor in the calculations of the German General Staff in 1914.'' Berlin's and Vienna's escalation of the crisis following the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in June 1914 was a pre-emptive strike -- a desperate attempt to exploit a rapidly shrinking strategic advantage vis--vis France and Russia. Explaining that Germany, with a large working-class movement and Socialist vote, was less militaristic than history books tend to assume, he gives his revisionism a further twist with the ''paradoxical conclusion'' that ''higher German military spending before July 1914 -- in other words, a more militaristic Germany -- far from causing the First World War, might have averted it.''

Even more controversial is his interpretation of the British role. A few historians in Germany have been trying to shift responsibility away from Berlin and Vienna toward London. Britain, as the dominant power in the international system, they claim, contributed to the 1914 catastrophe by doing too little in prewar years to keep a volatile and economically bustling Germany integrated into the world order. Instead it promoted Berlin's isolation without also clearly committing itself to defending France.

Ferguson offers a variation on this theme: if, as was conceivable in August 1914, Britain had kept out of the war, the Germans would have won; but the long-term effect of this victory on the world would have been less harmful than the actual course of history after 1918: ''Had Britain stood aside -- even for a matter of weeks -- Continental Europe could . . . have been transformed into something not wholly unlike the European Union we know today -- but without the massive contraction in British overseas power entailed by the fighting of two world wars.'' Even more miraculously, ''with the Kaiser triumphant, Adolf Hitler could have eked out his life as a mediocre postcard painter . . . in a German-dominated Central Europe about which he could have found little to complain. And Lenin could have carried on his splenetic scribbling in Zurich, forever waiting for capitalism to collapse -- and forever disappointed.'' In Ferguson's eyes, the trouble was that British leaders did join the war and thereby ''helped insure that, when Germany finally did achieve predominance on the Continent, Britain was no longer strong enough to provide a check to it.''

So, preoccupied with the state of Europe and his marginalized country now, Ferguson concludes that the outbreak of war in 1914, which the British entry turned into a cataclysmic world conflict, was ''worse than a tragedy, which is something we are taught by the theater to regard as ultimately unavoidable.'' In trying to restore human agency to catastrophe, he finds that World War I was not only ''at once piteous . . . and 'a pity' ''; it was ''nothing less than the greatest error of modern history.''

Now, before we get carried away by a view that moves Britain's errors and Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, into the glaring limelight, let us not forget those in Berlin and Vienna who did in fact pull the trigger. By his own admission, the chief of the German General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, knew he took a tremendous gamble when he pushed for German mobilization against France, Russia and neutral Belgium. But historians, looking for a minimum of rationality in the management even of extreme crises, have assumed that he and his colleagues still expected a German victory. Recently discovered documents indicate, though, that on Aug. 1, 1914, Moltke no longer held such hopes. He had no idea what would happen after the opening moves to start the conflict or how a world war, once begun, might be won.

If this is correct, the Great War was not ''the greatest error in modern history'' committed by the British Government, as Ferguson would have it. Rather, and beyond the structures and pressures of international conflict and domestic politics that must not be ignored, it was an act of incredible political and moral irresponsibility, perpetrated by a small group of men around the German Emperor at the instigation of a fatalistic Prussian general who was at the end of his tether.

V. R. Berghahn teaches German history at Columbia University. His books include ''Germany and the Approach of War in 1914.''